Since mobile communication systems use limited radio resources, a transfer characteristic of a radio link continuously changes with time under the influence of a change in the distance between a subscriber terminal and a base station, shadowing, fast fading, noise and so on. In a mobile communication system, a link adaptation technology is used for allocating and controlling the radio resources, which is adapted to the change in the characteristic of each link, when services are provided simultaneously to a number of subscribers within one cell area.
The link adaptation technology and a traffic adaptation technology are the core technology for radio resource management to provide a number of subscribers with various multimedia services by using the limited radio resources. A radio resource management technology includes call admission control, congestion control, dynamic channel allocation, handoff, power control, rate control, packet scheduling, load sharing, automatic repeat request (ARQ) and so on.
There has been suggested a variety of radio resource management technologies in the mobile communication system as follows.
Among them, a method for processing a radio resource management protocol in the conventional mobile communication system is to divide a layer-3 into a call control function block, a radio resource management function block and a mobility management function block. Correlations between the three blocks are excluded so that each block is independent and it facilitates a change of each function or an addition of new function. However, this conventional technology provides only the method for processing the radio resource management protocol in the radio resource management function block.
As another technology, there is provided a method for reducing a refusal rate for a packet service when a number of subscribers are registered in a particular cell area or when a traffic load in the particular area is large, by allocating radio resources based on a comparison between a predetermined limit value of QoS and a requested value of QoS for each routing region in a packet service of mobile switching center. This technology provides a method for controlling QoS in the mobile communication system, thereby improving the subscriber satisfaction of services in the particular cell area.
As one another conventional technology, there is provided a method for managing radio resources by defining levels corresponding to respective resource availabilities and informing a subscriber of a change in the resource availability by using notification such as an alarm for each level, thereby allowing the subscriber to simply manage an increase or a decrease in resource installation. This technology enables a manager of a base station to check, in real-time, a resource condition in the base station and it provides a standard of the increase or decrease in the resource installation, thereby efficiently managing the radio resources in the base station.
However, since these technologies for radio resource management do not teach any efficient management or operation of the limited radio resources, it is difficult to actively cope with differentiated service requests from subscribers, and it also has many restrictions in light of use of the radio resources.
As the radio data services to be selected by a subscriber become various, there are provided the services having diverse characteristics such as mobility and so on which are different from existing voice services. Accordingly, it is required to provide various resource allocation and requirements corresponding to the services. Moreover, to provide a number of subscribers with desired services using the limited radio resources and to efficiently operate the limited radio resources, it is required a scheme for clearly classifying the services requested by subscriber and characteristics thereof, and it is also required a scheme for applying and operating the radio resources accordingly.